Westcon-Comstor has agreed to distribute Viptela's software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology globally. In fact, Viptela is now part of Westcon’s invitation-only Acceleration program.
The program identifies and incubates emerging technologies in growing markets. Not by coincidence, the SD-WAN market is expected to reach $9.06 billion by 2021, up from $738.9 million in 2016, according to Markets and Markets. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 65.11 percent, the researcher says.
Anthony D’Angelo, Viptela’s vice president of worldwide channel sales, tells ChannelE2E the deal will help his company expand its reach even further. “The accelerate partners are treated similarly to global partners,” he says. “They get access to global advisory council and things like that. So that is crucial and one of the reasons we were so interested in doing it.”
Pushing Towards The Cloud
Traditional wide area networks often rely on proprietary hardware. SD-WAN moves the network control into the cloud via software. That approach allows service providers to more effectively manage modern networks and their complex workloads.
SD-WANs, according to D’Angelo, allows for much more control. “It relieves you of the burden of having to touch every single box,” he says. “You're essentially virtualizing your network and that gives you a lot more control and the ability to adjust to the changing needs of your business.”
That's particularly important as new devices and IoT sensors load networks with new types of traffic, he adds. “The old network is static,” D'Angelo says. “It doesn't allow them to be nimble and agile and adapt to those things.”
WANs also require a global approach, he asserts. “We're viewing it as a global marketplace,” he says. “We're doing everything we can do to make sure our partners, no matter where they are, can handle those multinational customers and that they've got the supportive structure to help them do that.”
Viptela launched its channel program in October 2016, so it's a relatively young operation. But from the outset, D’Angelo says the company had its sites set globally. “When you're authorized with us you're authorized globally, that's completely within our purview,” he says. “So we just established that that's what we were going to do.”
Familiar Faces
The relationship with Westcon emerged naturally. The two companies had worked together on a limited basis in the past, and D’Angelo sees today's news as the next natural step in that relationship.
D’Angelo, by the way, is a former Westcon VP who previously oversaw the distributor's global vendor management team. That experience made him familiar with how Westcon operated. “I was very familiar with their internal teams and capabilities. They were just the perfect choice to get us that global expansion. That reach that our partners needed and that we needed,” he says.
Multiple companies made SD-WAN announcements focused on channel partners this week.
